O'Reilly & Peters: Allawi's a Shill for Bush
Reported by Marie Therese - August 11, 2004 -
The O'Reilly Factor, August 10, 2004. 8:12 PM - 8:17 PM EDT.
Guest: Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, US Army (Ret.), author of Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace.
From an interview between Chickenhawk O'Reilly and "Blood and Guts" Peters:
O'REILLY: If President Bush doesn't get al-Sadr - because it's really up to him - makin' a huge mistake, right?
PETERS: Well, right now we do need the cover, the top cover, from the Iraqi government. And the Iraqi government is giving us a top cover. Prime Minister Allawi - for all his faults - is saying "Go get this guy" and we're the ones who are hesitating.
O'REILLY: Well, I hope we get him.
Yesterday Col. Peters was in rare form both in print (Column Misplaced Mercy, NY Post) and on The O'Reilly Factor.
PETERS: "You can't put this kind of thing off. And it's sad because it's a traditional American failing to worry about the short term consequences - 'Oh my God, what'll happen if we kill Moqtada al-Sadr? ' Well, the problem doesn't get better with time. You bite the bullet - whatever cliche you want to use - suck it up in the short term. Let the world rage for a couple of days, but then the guy is dead and that has a gorgeous finality to it. And ya' move on."
O'Reilly bemoans the fact that al-Sadr is "hidin' out in the Ali shrine, which is a shrine well-known to Muslims all over the world. If we go into that shrine and drag him out of there or shoot him in the mosque or whatever, then, as you said, it's all over the world on al-Jazeera and we are the infidels, we defile the Ali shrine and this creates more problems in the short term."
PETERS: "Well, we may very well be setting up a deal where the Marines do 99% of it and then the last 1% is indeed done by Iraqis."
When O'Reilly asks Peters if there is any "validity to the charge" that "because we invaded Iraq, we angered the Muslim world and this helped bin Laden and Al Qaeda and all of these radical muslims?" Peters, of course, answers that there is "very slight" validity "if any" to that charge.
Comment:
Take it from me. After 6 months of watching a steady diet of O'Reilly's drivel, I've come to know his repeat guests. Lt. Col. Peters is someone he drags out when he needs to fan the flames of WAR and RETRIBUTION and SALVAGING AMERICA'S LOST HONOR and LET'S GET THE BASTARDS. Peters is the FOX spokesman for the "Diplomacy Be Damned, Shoot the Bastards" wing of the Republican Party.
The "gorgeous finality" of death? Wonder what XXX websites Peters goes to?
Killing al-Sadr will create a "short-term" problem? Get real, Bill. The consequences of killing al-Sadr would be devastating. Thousands of unemployed, angry Iraqis are already demonstrating in his support. If we harm one stone of the Ali shrine, there will be hell to pay.
Imagine this scenario: Al-Zarqawi hides in the shrine of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Israelis destroy the shrine to get the bad guy. How do you think the Christians around the world would react? Do you think they would "forgive" the Israelis for the destruction?
I notice that Peters carefully omitted saying on FOX News Channel what he posits in his N. Y. Post opinion piece, and I quote: "Among ourselves, we need to stop pretending that Iraq is a one-time deal. We'll be in the Middle East for decades to come, in unexpected locations."
Guess the higher-ups at FOX don't want their viewers to hear Col. Peters on this topic. Oh, no. Might bother them, might make them think about the dreaded "D" word: DRAFT. And we wouldn't want those people to know until after the election that the Bush administration will need mandatory conscription in order to feed the monster it has spawned in the Middle East.
If you'd like to read a different truth about Iraq I suggest you go to The New Standard. There you'll find the dispatches of a REAL reporter, one who didn't hole up in the Palestine Hotel, don a flack jacket and helmet and pose in front of a camera, pretending to be in a war zone.
Free-lance reporter Dahr Jamail, an American from Alaska, has recently returned from several months of reporting from actual sites in Iraq. He reported for Democracy Now!, The New Standard and Project Censored. His dispatches are well worth reading, especially if you want to know what was really going on in Fallujah, Basra, Tikrit and Baghdad as reported by someone who was actually there in the streets with the people. He has plans to return to Iraq in September, assuming there's a country to return to!
